News Posts

Gospel, jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, soul music, and hip-hop are the result of an ever-evolving African-American musical journey that has produced unique musical forms and traditions. The Museum will celebrate this legacy on Saturday, February 18, with the Global Weekends program The African-American Musical Mosaic, which will include performances by the Harlem Quartet, First Corinthian Baptist Church Choir, Charles Mack, Sandra Reaves-Phillips, and a special collaboration between Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of the hip-hop group Run-DMC and the IMPACT Repertory Theatre choir. In this video, DMC shares what performing at the Museum’s event means to him.

Scientists at the Museum recently helped a group of rabbis answer a culturally significant dietary question: can canned fish products containing parasitic worms still be considered kosher?

The study began last spring, when rabbinical experts from the Orthodox Union, the largest organization that certifies food products for the Jewish community, brought a variety of kosher-certified sardines and capelin eggs to the Museum. The presence of worms could have been a sign that, during the preparation of the canned food, muscle from the fish had been improperly handled and allowed to mix with intestinal contents, potentially violating Jewish dietary laws.

Curator Laurel Kendall was visiting Vietnam to collect artifacts for the 2003 exhibition Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind, and Spirit when she encountered an exceptional artisan near Hanoi. His medium was paper, and his specialty was creating votive offerings used in funeral rituals by the Kinh people, Vietnam’s majority population.

The Kinh, in common with some other East Asian peoples, believe that a deceased leaves the underworld 49 days after death to begin a new life. Family members burn paper objects—representing clothing, housewares, and other necessities—to equip their loved ones for the transition to the afterlife.

This Thursday, February 16, scientists, writers, and educators will gather for a panel discussion of how social media change the landscape of science communication. Beyond a Trend: Enhancing Science Communication Through Social Mediawill feature Ruth Cohen, the Museum’s senior director of education strategic initiatives and director of the Center for Lifelong Learning, Carl Zimmer, science journalist and author of Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, Ben Lillie, co-organizer of The Story Collider, and BBC journalist Matt Danzicoas panelists. Jennifer Kingson, day assignment editor for the Science section of The New York Times, will moderate the discussion. Below, Cohen talks about a few of the Museum’s recent forays into social media.

What better way to celebrate Charles Darwin’s 203rd birthday than by reading the famed naturalist’s scientific works in his own handwriting? You can do just that on Sunday, February, 12—also known as “Darwin Day”—and every day after on the Darwin Manuscripts Project website.

Free and available to all online, the Darwin Manuscripts Project is the most comprehensive catalogue of Darwin’s scientific manuscripts ever compiled. The project is based at the American Museum of Natural History and developed in close collaboration with Cambridge University Library, whose physical collection is the foundation of the new database, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library—represented by the Natural History Museum in London. This new tool will also include holdings from all other library—based Darwin collections globally.